More Proof Using Unity Is Lunacy – 300 days old

[ZemaTalon]

I've had two VM's running since last weekend, I've just been playing around with them in between doing other things, and just never shut them down. One was Mint 13 XFCE, and the other Ubuntu 12.04. I'd heard Unity fans raving about the latest Unity version, and I was curious if it might be a good choice for my sister who only does simple stuff. Mint is still going strong, and I did a lot of mucking around with it. I couldn't muck around much with Unity, because it's not allowed. Ubuntu froze up after 3 days. At first I wasn't sure, I thought it was just the way Unity is, with a window taking over the VM's screen and refusing to go away. But no it was frozen. But while it was still working, I couldn't find anything to rave over with the latest release, and if anything, I found it even more aggravating to use. Trying to find the applications you want is even more difficult - to see all applications you now have to click a tiny obscure button way down at the bottom of the mostly empty apps screen. It reminded me of Win8's way of hiding things. I think my sister would do better with a pre-configured XFCE or KDE desktop

[Grogan]

If the hardware is decent, I think KDE would be the best thing for new users. It's both powerful and eye candyish and IF you have the hardware for it, the bloat is actually somewhat efficient and only a philosophical objection can be made.

Stuff like Unity is just pollution.

[ZemaTalon]

She'll be using a Q6600 and maybe my old 295GTX. Maybe I'll setup a Cario Dock in KDE, she does like to access everything she uses from the desktop.

[Bad Haircut]

Kill the indexing in KDE and you'll drop to an average 400MB desktop start up, which on an average 4GB memory system is acceptable to most. They are currently working on it and tightening things up and I've seen strides made within a short period, so it'll get there or thereabouts soonish. A decent KDE distro installed to disk is extremely snappy on an average modern rig and highly configurable, probably too configurable.

Unity's admirers clearly don't want or need any type of meaningful configurability from a desktop environment. I and many others do, and wouldn't touch t with a barge pole. ~ disgusted of internet

[ZemaTalon]

Thanks BH!

[Bad Haircut]

http://www.my-guides.net/en/guides/l...konadi-in-kde4


That'll give you a quick reference where to look. Some KDE apps need the above to function correctly so ymmv but it's worth doing as a starter.

[ZemaTalon]

Cool, thanks

[Grogan]

I HATE those so called "desktop indexers". Why would I want a bunch of disk i/o for the unlikely case that I'm going to want to search for shit? I, like know where my stuff is, and stuff. If I need to find something it will be some obscure system file, not a multimedia file... I'll use the find command in a terminal. So what if it has to read stuff from disk? It's better than reading stuff from disk ALL THE TIME, just in case I want to search for it. As for metadata and file content searches, I'm not interested. That kind of silliness just makes for a bloated mess of databases.

Windows Search... bollocks. Google Desktop... bollocks. Bing Desktop... bollocks. Necromuckinfuckinsuckinadi... bollocks. slocate... bollocks. None of that.

[Bad Haircut]

As far as I can see unless you've got literally thousands of contacts, files and notes in apps like Kjots, it's just not worth it. I mean it does actually work and it works very well but it's not worth the extra overhead to me personally. I've had a small wager with myself as to how far they can get that overhead down in the case of KDE. If they reach a 50MB at start up point then it's worth it to me because it does actually work.

[[ GK ]]

I'm one of those people that likes Unity, up to a point. Its simplistic interface is both good and bad. Good if you like an easy to use interface, bad if you like to personalize things. I think I fall neatly in between.

I love the eye candy of KDE, but I find configuring it to be frustrating. It's not intuitive, but maybe that's just me.

[Bad Haircut]

Good if you like an easy to use interface, bad if you like to personalize things. I think I fall neatly in between.

I love the eye candy of KDE, but I find configuring it to be frustrating. It's not intuitive, but maybe that's just me.

Depends what you're trying to achieve, I guess. Can be as simple or as complicated as you make it. You can get well and truly lost trying to turn a vanilla KDE into something like Mint 13 if you don't know what you're doing. I can usually cobble the basics together through system settings Application Appearance / Workspace Appearance / Desktop Effects, but it depends even how far you go with that.

As I've grown more accustomed to using a vanilla KDE distro I tend to not bother and like it for what it is. The only time I'll bother is if I change Desktop Theme from Air.

[ZemaTalon]

I think configuring KDE or any other desktop just comes down to committing yourself to some time to figure out all the unintuitive stuff. There is logic in the way things work together, though it can be a puzzle. But that's also what makes it great - being able to make it what you want it to be, plus the sense of accomplishment when you have. And knowing you're not locked in the Unity/Windows 8 prison

[Dark Angel]

Unity is the best thing ever to happen to KDE/XFCE etc. Thousands of people suddenly realising that there is more than one option for their desktop (default Gnome) in Linux and branching out. It's sure as hell the reason I'm running XFCE on both my Slackware box and my netbook! I'm pretty likely to use it on the kids' machines as well when Ubuntu 10.04 is no longer supported and I have to update them. It's as simple or as complicated as you want to make it.
I didn't like KDE when I tried it, but I also have zero interest in the "Gnome/KDE wars". I figure people should use whatever suits them and helps them rather than hinders them. Unity/Win8 is just a hindrance, if not a disability.

[ZemaTalon]

I finally got that old machine assembled. Installed Win7 first - ran into a hitch with the IDE DVD drive not reading a known good Win7 install disk. Pulled the 10 year old drive out, and replaced it with one with a manufacture year of 2005 that hasn't seen much use. Win7 installed fine, though it seemed a bit slow to install. Next up was Mint 13 KDE. Live DVD starts, screen goes dark and stays that way for a long time, finally the KDE splash screen comes up, and mouse is frozen. And so is the KDE boot status indicator, which only displays the first icon - the hard drive one. No change after 20 mins, mouse will move a little bit, but not much, and what there is is delayed movement. Seems like an I/O problem, maybe this optical drive is fubar too. After rebooting it does the same thing. The rest of the hardware isn't extremely ancient - 5 year old Q6600 and Asus P5W motherboard, 3 year old GTX 295 vid card, and six year old WD HD. The board has Jmicron controllers - I've heard they've been known to cause problems with Linux in the past - fixed with newer kernels and BIOSes, but I tried disabling it just in case, but it made no difference. So, guess I'll have to scrounge up yet another optical drive or try a thumb drive if this machine will cooperate with one of those.

[Grogan]

It could be. A pressed Windows 7 installation disk installed, but seemed to install slowly. That could be due to read retries.

A burned disk barfed.

Unsurprising behaviour. Pressed disks do seem to read easier, and that's one of the symptoms of a marginally bad optical drive. Most pressed disks seem to read OK and most burned disks fail.

Another possibility is that on some chipsets, there's a problem with IDE optical drives because the IDE controller really isn't an IDE controller. It's just emulated and is often not even native (i.e. jmicron, not bridged to the ICH controller) I tend to never use the IDE ports and stick with SATA devices on boards of that era and newer. I have seen it where Windows doesn't have a problem, but LInux does. Try a SATA optical drive if you're not having any luck.

[ZemaTalon]

This board does have an awful lot of jmicron in it so I wouldn't be surprised. I did manage to locate a fairly recent sata optical drive to try in it so I'll give that a go pretty soon

[ZemaTalon]

Well that didn't work either. I installed a nearly new (1 year old) sata dvd burner, and at first it wasn't seen at all. This board already had one bad sata port on which I had stuck a little sticker years ago to remind me in the future. So apparently it wasn't the only bad one. I tried another port, and then it was seen. Booted up the Mint DVD again, and promptly got stuck in the exact same place on the splash screen, where it's been sitting for the past 30 mins without change. It stopped reading from the DVD, though occasionally I'd hear it spin up a little, but without the access light blipping. I'm thinking at this point it might take a new motherboard to get this thing to cooperate. A thumbdrive might work, but I don't know if this board would be reliable, or if the optical drive would be usable in the OS's. Almost forgot - while I was in the BIOS checking to see if it was seeing the DVD drive, it completely froze up.

[Dark Angel]

If it freezes in the BIOS there's something wrong with the hardware, but exactly what will take a little effort to find. See if you can get Memtest running.

[Grogan]

It does seem like that machine has issues (froze while in bios setup screens). Is everything OK in Windows?

Have you ruled out a bad burn on the Mint DVD? I was kind of assuming it was one that you have used before on another computer without problems, seeing as you didn't mention it.

Sometimes if you run memtest86/memtest86+ even for a few minutes it'll find show stopping errors. Screwy things happen when RAM is unreliable. I got lucky to find a bad DIMM a few weeks ago. It wasn't obvious in the symptoms, but memtest86+ started showing errors in about 20 seconds. Reproducable with the one stick only. I would normally never waste my time with that in the field, because it's almost never bad RAM and even when it is you wouldn't see it unless you repeated the test many times.

[ZemaTalon]

I'll give memtest a try. I hadn't thought memory since this mem had been working fine when I was using it last year, but things can change. Yeah I previously used this same disk on another machine so I know it's good. It seems ok in Windows, I was in there long enough to install vid driver and a few other things.

[Dark Angel]

It could be as stupid as a tiny bit of corrosion on one of the memory module pins causing it to make unreliable contact.

[ZemaTalon]

So far its passing memtest, it's been running about 10 mins.

[Dark Angel]

Given the symptoms so far if it's going to fail I'd expect it in the first pass. A flakey dvd drive or controller is also on the cards.

[ZemaTalon]

Ran about two hours with no errors. This is the 3rd optical drive I've tried, and this one is fairly new. But I tried some other things - first I used the disk integrity check, and it verified that the install disk was good. Then I tried booting it in compatibility mode. That got me all the way into X, and I was able to launch the installer. When I went to reboot after installation, it went straight to a blank screen - I never got the normal shutdown display or the message about waiting for the installation media to be removed. Then on rebooting I don't have X, and nor can X be launched.

[Dark Angel]

If you have networking you could try installing another desktop and see if it pulls everything back into line.
...
Your video card isn't flakey is it? This is starting to sound like what happened to Bits not too long ago.

[ZemaTalon]

That's an idea, think I have networking since it reported how many packages are avail to update. It's hard to say about the vid card - it has a big arse heat spreader so I can't see the caps, but it was working fine under Mint on another machine until I swapped it out recently.

[Dark Angel]

Maybe try reseating it and see if that helps anything.

[Grogan]

For X related barfage, in addition to video cards, you also have to consider input devices. A bad keyboard or mouse sending out spurious signals etc. These problems may manifest differently between Linux and Windows.

See if you can start the system without X. (They make that difficult these days... it's no longer a simple matter of starting in a different runlevel, no, they are far too clever to use runlevels in Ubuntu. I honestly don't know what the fuck goes through these people's heads. Change things just for the sake of it, so nobody knows anything about your distro anymore). Try to "startx" then when it fails, look at the log file /var/log/Xorg.0.log

They keep changing this shit. I'm still trying to figure out the best way to do that in Mint 13. (even /etc/init/gdm.override doesn't work anymore... the bastards)

Anyway, Xorg.0.log for additional information. (may not need to start without X first)

[ZemaTalon]

I ended up changing out mouse & keyboard in the process of moving it elsewhere to work on today. It does start without X, and in fact it's starting up as if it were set to runlevel 1, or whatever it's called by Ubuntu now. I'll check the log file, since I already attempted to startx, which resulted in a bunch of errors about missing stuff

[Grogan]

That's the thing... it doesn't actually use runlevels anymore. (This is the crap I hate... WHY?) It only emulates them for starting services etc.

I just found out, the only way now is to do it with the grub bootloader. Edit /etc/default/grub

Change GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=”quiet splash” to:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=”text”

Then you can manually start X with startx after booting and logging in. (The way I like it... I never use session managers)

Then you must run update-grub as if you just installed a new kernel or something.

That's gay.

P.S. Holy lies and misinformation... not even that works correctly. I just get a black screen.

I hate this shit. If Ubuntu (Mint is unfortunately based on it) was all there was, I'd quit using a computer.

[ZemaTalon]

I guess it's no surprise unnecessary bizarre changes like that would only come from the same organization that inflicted Unity upon the world

[Grogan]

It doesn't even make sense to base the decision to start X on a bootloader parameter. The setting really has nothing to do with X, they are just using it like a variable.

[Dark Angel]

When they release Slack 14 I expect I'll be installing that on my desktop.

[ZemaTalon]

I finally got it sorted out. I read where a lot of folks were having issues with some Nvidia cards in Mint13 and the suggestion was to use nomodeset when booting the live DVD. Doing so did allow it to boot up normally and install, but didn't work for the new installation. A little more reading revealed that some of the people having problems were using two cards in sli, and they had to remove one to get it installed & the driver in place. I was using a single card with dual GPU's. So I swapped out the 295 for an 8800GT, and it booted right up into the install no problem. I was going to swap the 295 back in after installing the Nvidia driver, but on 2nd thought realized that could potentially be a problem if anything should go wrong in the future - a new kernel requiring the vid driver to be reinstalled etc. And then I'd have to drive all the way back over there to fix it. So maybe I'll just leave the 8800 in. It's unlikely to make any difference in this case anyway

[ZemaTalon]

KDE is setup with the panel moved to the top, and set to auto-hide, and Cairo-dock is at the bottom. I added XFCE as a fallback. Only thing is Cairo wants to auto-load there too - I was going to just setup standard XFCE launchers. Probably doesn't matter, odds are they'll mostly be using KDE anyway and Cairo-dock would be familiar if they do ever need to use XFCE. In Windows 7 I installed RocketDock (similar to Cairo-dock) positioned at the bottom with the Win7 taskbar at the top set to auto-hide. I installed all the applications I know they use. Overall both OS's now look pretty slick and usable for the way they like to do things. Now to see what kind of fine-tuning I can do.

[ZemaTalon]

Because a picture is worth a thousand words, here's a couple of pictures I ended up putting the 295 GTX back in - I gave them a copy of Just Cause 2 I picked up for $3 in a Steam sale - it ran ok under the 8800, but the graphics just weren't impressive enough, I wanted them to have the "full effect" (as IA used to say). So now I have all the settings turned all the way up so it looks like it did when I used to play that game a lot. They like tropical environments so I thought they'd enjoy the ambiance of this game, even if they don't want to go around blowing stuff up. I just hope a future kernel update doesn't screw things up with the vid driver. Fortunately Mint doesn't update the kernel that often.

This is the RocketDock in Windows 7. I know it looks like overkill with all those launchers, but my sister always complains about not having enough launchers on the desktop. I don't expect to hear any such complaints now RocketDock autohides though, so it's not in the way.

429.0.Win7.jpg


This is Mint13 KDE with Cairo-dock. It has multiple themes avail - this one consists of 3 separate docks, all of which independently auto-hide when a window moves into their space. I set up the KDE panel similar to how I set up the top panel in XFCE, with just the basics. I put Synaptic in there because for some reason it refused to launch from Cairo. That system menu on the desktop I put there just in case all else failed - Cairo crashed etc.

485.0.Mint13KDE.jpg

[Alakazam]

Good job Zema, a bit cluttered for my tastes on the Win DT but everyone is different and everyone knows what they like.

[ZemaTalon]

Thanks Zammy, and I agree, very different from my way of livin too, but my way of livin didn't go over so well on her other machine


Getting back to the subject of disabling the auto-starting of X, I came across this:

" Okay another way would be to disable the lightdm service in init:

/etc/init/lightdm.conf
in there there is a section like this:

start on (filesystem
and started dbus
and (drm-device-added card0 PRIMARY_DEVICE_FOR_DISPLAY=1
or stopped udev-fallback-graphics))
"

Then to call the GUI I just need to run lightdm.